1.3.15

CBGBs - A Report from the Front Line, Part 2

Here’s the second part of the long story I wrote
for MM in 1976 about CBGBs and the downtown New York rock scene.

With the possible exception of Lou Reed, CBGBs’
manager Hilly Kristal can justifiably claim to have done more to promote the
New York underground scene than any other individual. Reed may have provided
the inspiration (several bands seem to emulate the Velvet Underground with
uncanny accuracy), but Kristal provided a base for them to operate.

CBGBs,
at the junction of Bleeker Street and the Bowery, lies in the seediest section
of the Village Eastside. Before Kristal took the place over two years ago, it
was a hang-out for Hell’s Angels. It was – and still is – flanked by “hotels”
that offer a bed for the night at ridiculously cheap rates. The catch is that
you share a room with half a dozen others whose sense of personal hygiene is,
perhaps, not in tune with the national average.

Kristal
is a large, quiet man of the strong but silent mode. With his red-and-black
check shirts, burly physique and curly beard he looks more like a lumberjack
from the Canadian forests than a patron of the arts.

He’s
made it his business to look after his charges like a family patriarch,
encouraging them to develop their own musical policy whether he personally likes
it or not. One of the rules for bands playing at CBGBs is that they must play
original material or, if they do offer a non-original, they must have worked
out a creative arrangement of their own.

There’s
a spirit of unity among the bands that play CBGBs that keeps the bandwagon
rolling and, in early days, assured everyone of a reasonable audience. On any
given night members of various bands will drop by to watch their friends, not
just to size up the competition but to share in the universal uphill struggle of
which they are all a part.

It’s
a long, narrow bar with a ludicrously small stage at one end. Neon beer signs
flicker down on the audience – 300 or so at the most – and waitresses fight
between tables to deliver beer in cramped conditions. A juke box plays mainly
British Sixties music between sets (and sometimes during, though no-one
notices) and when a band starts the din is often so loud that glasses tremble
on the table tops.

Kristal
hopes to enlarge his emporium soon. “I’m gonna knock down the washrooms and put
the stage further back. We’ll put the washrooms in the cellar and get another
hundred people in by next February,” he told me proudly last week.

“I
felt that it was important that we put it out because we had the momentum going
at that time,” he said, referring to the recently released CBGBs album. “We
felt it would encourage others to do a similar thing. Jim Delehant (an Atlantic
A&R man) seemed to be the keenest record company man so I went with him
when he proposed the idea, but I’d have put it out myself either way.

“They have first option on the bands,
but they haven’t exercised that because their first concern was this album and
the idea behind it. They felt that a lot of the groups might make it, but that
wasn’t the prime concern. I think that a lot of the people who have reviewed
the album have taken the wrong attitude... it’s the idea of the album that is
important. The idea is to document what’s happening.

“I
don’t think reviewers realise that the album is live. We didn’t go over and
over tracks polishing them up, I just picked what I thought was a
representative thing. People have said to me that it doesn’t represent the
underground rock in New York because it didn’t have Television or the Talking
Heads, but I just took what was available.”

Originally
Kristal pressed 5,000 copies of the album and advertised it by mail order in
local papers. Many orders (including one for 2,000 from Paris) came from
Europe, but once it became known that Atlantic had taken it over, the orders fell
off. Kristal still has about 1,000 originals left which he sells as collectors’
items.

The
album has not made a profit. “It cost $17,000 (or £10,000) to make the album
and that’s just my expenses in making the master tape before the actual
pressing. The bands haven’t started to earn their money from it yet, but they
could use the money so we’ll be attending to the publishing of it all in two or
three weeks.”

Following
the release of the album, all eight bands – the Shirts, Mink De Ville, Laughing
Dogs, the Miami’s, Sun, Manster, Tuff Darts and Stuart’s Hammer – went off on a
“tour” together, supervised by Kristal, an administrative headache of alarming
proportions since the entourage numbered over 50.

Billed
as the CBGBs Road Show, the bands took over Boston’s Rat Club for a whole week.
Some only played one or two sets, but others stayed the week and gave up to a
dozen performances. Kristal’s plans for the future involve taking “his” bands
all around the East Coast. As yet, of course, none save the more established
acts like Patti Smith and the Ramones have travelled very far.

“After
the first two weeks the sales figures on the album reached about 12,000 which
isn’t too bad. Atlantic thought it would sell in New York, but they didn’t
realise we could sell in Cleveland, St. Louis and even California. I think that
sales will pick up after Christmas because we can’t really compete with all the
big acts releasing albums right now.”

Curiously
Kristal had no intention of creating an underground rock palace when he took
over the Bowery club. CBGBs, in fact, stands for Country, Bluegrass and Blues
which is the type of music he originally envisaged promoting. “There just wasn’t
enough talent around playing that kind of music, and it turned out that there
were a lot of rock bands rehearsing all over with nowhere to play.

“What
I felt was that they had to develop character in their own music. I didn’t tell
them what to play, but they can’t play copy music. Original doesn’t have to be
only their own stuff. If a band can interpret something and make it really
their own, then that’s better than writing their own music that copies things
others have done.”